by Mark Tufo
Copyright © October 1st, 2018 by Nicholas Sansbury Smith
All Rights Reserved
Originally published by Amazon Kindle Worlds in 2016-2017
Cover Design by Eloise Knapp
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.
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Contents
Dedication
Foreword by Nicholas Sansbury Smith
Darkness Evolved by Anthony J Melchiorri
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Extinction: Thailand by Russell Blake
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The Bone Collector by Jeff Olah
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Extinction: Trippin’ by Mark Tufo
Prologue
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The Fall of Fort Bragg by Rachel Aukes
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Epilogue
About the Authors
Dedication
To the Extinction Cycle fans that have propelled the story and characters to a level I never thought possible. Thank you for your support and encouragement. #TeamGhost
“All it takes, is all you got…”
Foreword
by
Nicholas Sansbury Smith
Dear Reader,
Thank you for picking up a copy of Missions from the Extinction Cycle. These aren’t just any missions. I hand selected these reader favorites because I believe they play homage to Team Ghost and the Extinction Cycle storyline I’ve created.
Please note, all of these stories were previously featured in Amazon’s Extinction Cycle Kindle World. As you may know, Amazon ended the Kindle Worlds program in July of 2018. Authors were given a chance to republish or retire their stories, and I jumped at the chance to republish them and share them with you under my small press, Great Wave Ink.
For those of you that are new to the storyline, the Extinction Cycle is the award winning, Amazon top-rated, and half a million copy best-selling seven book saga. There are over six thousand five-star reviews on Amazon alone. Critics have called it, “World War Z and The Walking Dead meets the Hot Zone.” Publishers weekly added, “Smith has realized that the way to rekindle interest in zombie apocalypse fiction is to make it louder, longer, and bloodier… Smith intensifies the disaster efficiently as the pages flip by, and readers who enjoy juicy blood-and-guts action will find a lot of it here.”
In creating the Extinction Cycle, my goal was to use authentic military action and real science to take the zombie and post-apocalyptic genres in an exciting new direction. Forget everything you know about zombies. In the Extinction Cycle, they aren’t created by black magic or other supernatural means. The ones found in the Extinction Cycle are created by a military bio-weapon called VX-99, first used in Vietnam. The chemicals reactivate the proteins encoded by the genes that separate humans from wild animals—in other words, the experiment turned men into monsters. For the first time, zombies are explained using real science—science so real there is every possibility of something like the Extinction Cycle actually happening. But these creatures aren’t the unthinking, slow-minded, shuffling monsters we’ve all grown accustomed to in other shows, books, and movies. These “variants” are more monster than human. Through the series, the variants become the hunters as they evolve from the epigenetic changes. Scrambling to find a cure and defeat the monsters, humanity is brought to the brink of extinction.
We hope you enjoy each of the five Extinction Cycle missions and will continue to the main Extinction Cycle series. A link to sample book 1 has been provided at the end of this collection for those wanting to continue the adventure. Thank you for reading!
Best wishes,
Nicholas Sansbury Smith, NYT Bestselling Author of the Extinction Cycle
Darkness Evolved
by
Anthony J Melchiorri
An Extinction Cycle Novella
© Anthony J Melchiorri – All rights reserved
— 1 —
Marine Staff Sergeant Jose Garcia did not flinch when the tattoo gun needle jabbed into his skin at a rate of almost one thousand times per minute. He sat on the edge of his berth aboard the USS George Washington, steadying his arm as he took the tattoo gun to himself. The gentle waves of the Atlantic rocked the massive carrier ever so slightly, and the buzz of the gun drowned out the metallic creaking of the ship.
Each time the needle pierced his skin, it left another black mark in the stylized cross tattooed on the inside of his right forearm. And each time it stabbed in, he hated that he had grown used to it. Hated that the pain of the needle was nothing compared to the pain of what had driven him to take his tattoo gun to his own arm once again. Hate had become almost as familiar to him as the tattoo gun. He had lost far more than brothers to the Variants; he had lost his family too.
Yes, hate for the Variants and for the men who created them came easy to him.
When he was satisfied with the new addition to his artwork, he pulled the gun away and took his foot off the pedal. The gun fell silent. After stowing it back under his berth, he rotated his arm. He pulled his hand over his short-cropped hair and admired his work. With a long exhalation, he dabbed at the spots of crimson pushing themselves up through the black ink and olive skin.
Ray Stanford.
He would never forget that name, and it was not just because the name was now tattooed on his forearm.
Stanford had been one of Garcia’s men, a brother in arms serving in the six-man Force Recon group he led. He did not need a tattoo to remind him of Stanford’s valiant attempt to
hold back a swarm of Variants when they had been on a mission outside New York City. The images of Stanford being ripped apart, his ribs torn from his chest, his femur bursting from his flesh, hot scarlet liquid splashing out of his neck when the Variants sank their fangs into him, were more than enough to ensure Garcia never forgot his fallen brother.
In twenty years of service, Garcia had memorialized too many of his comrades within the cross on his arm. It had taken almost two decades of fighting overseas, largely against terrorist and insurgent threats in the Middle East, to add the first half-dozen names. There had been plenty of raw skin still ready to use as fresh canvas. It had only taken a few weeks after the spread of the Hemorrhage Virus to fill the cross to the point where he only had room for seven, maybe eight more names.
A shiver snuck through his freshly inked arm. He wondered how long it would take before he needed another cross. Letting out a deep breath, he closed his eyes.
Please, God, don’t make me write another name.
He crossed himself and said the Lord’s Prayer, praying for strength, for deliverance from the heavy weight of loss and death weighing on his mind. But he worried God was not going to solve his problems. God was not going to save his men. It was the damned US Army that had performed the perverted medical research resulting in the Hemorrhage Virus, then VX-99, which swept through the United States, turning men into monsters. It was mortal men who developed the bioweapons that had created the Variants. Humans had gotten themselves into this mess, and now they would have to get themselves out.
A knock at his hatch broke his dark reverie. Garcia stood. His boots slapped against the metal deck. He puffed out his chest, willing himself to appear strong while taping a strip of gauze over the tattoo to soak up the blood.
When he opened the hatch, a man with a mustache and hair to match Garcia’s gave him a nod.
“You okay, brother?” Rick Thomas, a sergeant in Garcia’s team, asked.
“Once we rid the earth of all those damn Variants, then I’ll be okay,” he said through gritted teeth. He was lying, though. He knew he would never truly be okay. Not with everything he had already seen and lost.
“You and me both. Lt. Davis sent for us. Wants us to meet her in CIC.”
“When?”
“Now,” Thomas said. “Said it’s urgent.”
“When isn’t it?”
Garcia closed the hatch and strode through the passage toward the CIC. Thomas fell in step beside him as men and women rushed past. Each shared the same bags under the eyes, the same weary looks.
Thomas eyed the fresh gauze on Garcia’s arm. “Stanford hasn’t even been laid to rest. What do you want to bet Davis is sending us out again?”
“Our work’s never done. Not until the geeks in the lab come up with a cure or we meet our maker.” A new bioweapon that could eradicate the Variants could not come soon enough. With every passing day, Garcia worried there were not enough bullets or soldiers in the world to eradicate the monsters.
“I’m starting to think meeting our maker will come first,” Thomas said, dodging past a group of SEALs jogging down the corridor in full battle regalia.
Garcia stopped himself before he said the words floating in his mind. He wanted to tell Thomas he was ready to meet his Lord, ready to be reunited with his six-month-old daughter, Leslie, and his wife, Ashley. Regret hung heavy on him with each passing day spent in their absence. His thoughts often turned toward the “what ifs.” What if he had stayed behind with them when his orders had come in? What if he had gone AWOL, running to the hills or mountains with his family instead? What if he had known the outbreak would end only in destruction, death, apocalypse? Sorrow filled him as much as exhaustion these days. Instead of staying behind and abandoning his duty, he had reported for duty and was whisked away to the George Washington strike group while his family had been stranded in their home in North Carolina and undoubtedly fallen to the Variants.
He hated to admit it, but getting a fast-pass ticket to Heaven would be a welcome reprieve if it meant he could hold Leslie in his arms once more and share a loving embrace with Ashley. Then again, at this point in his life, he was not sure Heaven was where he would go if he died. Ashley had been a saint, volunteering at women’s shelters and cooking for soup kitchens. She had run a nonprofit community health center. All Garcia knew how to do was take lives. Better he stay on Earth and do his part to serve humanity, prove to himself and the guy in the sky he was worth something.
Thomas stopped in the passageway and held a hatch open. Garcia rolled his sleeve down over the gauze and entered the CIC. A wave of noise overwhelmed him as people leaned over monitors, watching the movements of dozens of different spec ops teams, mechanized units, and airborne forces on missions all across the United States.
A lean woman with eyes as blue as the Atlantic and a jawline sharper than a knife approached him.
Garcia and Thomas straightened at the sight of Lt. Rachel Davis and offered a salute. “Ma’am,” they said in unison.
“At ease,” she replied, gesturing toward a table where a group of marines huddled. “I know your team just returned. I promise we’ll take the time to properly honor Stanford later, but I need you guys now.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Garcia said. He willed the weight on his eyelids to subside as he and Thomas followed Lt. Davis to the chart table. There he joined the rest of his now five-man team. Steve “Stevo” Holmes stood with his arms crossed, his Dumbo ears sticking out against his boyish face. Next to him was the massive form of Ryan “Tank” Talon with the team’s radio still strapped over his shoulders. Beside him stood Jeremy “Mulder” Weaver. The man was a natural-born sprinter with a runner’s lean form. When news of VX-99 spreading like wildfire first got to Garcia’s team, Weaver had offered a lame guess that the virus had extraterrestrial origins. The men never let him live it down. In fact, it was Stanford who had given him the name Mulder after the famous extraterrestrial believer from The X-Files.
Another unfamiliar marine with straight black hair sauntered over to them, an MK11 slung across his back.
“This is Lance Corporal Howard Kuang,” Lt. Davis said. “He’ll be your sixth man.”
“Sarge,” Lance Corporal Kuang started, nodding at Garcia, “I know I can’t replace Stanford, but I’ll give it my all. Whatever the hell I can do for the team, I will.”
The tattoo with Stanford’s name still stung. The skinny marine seemed confident enough, but confidence in the CIC often did not translate to confidence in the face of Variants with maws of daggerlike fangs and claws long enough to gut an elephant. “Understood, Marine,” Garcia said. “How many Variants have you killed?”
Kuang’s expression dropped. “More than I can keep track of. Not enough to make me happy.”
No amount of dead Variants would make Garcia happy.
“I’m not unfamiliar with the monsters’ ferocity, if that’s what you’re implying.” Kuang pulled his shirt up, revealing a scar stretching from hip to sternum.
“Fair enough.” Garcia held out a hand. “Kuang, is it?”
Kuang gripped Garcia’s hand in a firm handshake. “My team called me Kong. I ain’t royalty, so don’t call me King.”
Garcia could not help but smirk. It sounded as though the marine had delivered that line more than once. “Very well, Kong. Welcome to the team.”
The group turned their attention to Lt. Davis. She gestured to a monitor set up on the chart table.
Garcia’s stomach twisted into a painful knot as he stared at the map. Adrenaline pumped through his vessels, churned on by unadulterated anger. Ashley’s face appeared in his mind, at first her beaming smile as she bent to kiss him. Then the look of horror he imagined she wore when the first Variant found her and Leslie. Sweat dripped down his spine. His fingers trembled, and his jaw went slack as he tried to work the muscles in it. The snarl of emotions forcing themselves through him felt like a dagger ravaging his intestines and cutting apart his organs in slow, savage strokes. “
Pardon me, ma’am, but seriously?”
Lt. Davis sighed. She knew where he came from, where his family had lived. “It’s why I picked your team, Garcia.”
The monitor displayed the lengthy stretch of beaches and parks that comprised North Carolina’s Outer Banks. It was a place etched into his mind. He had spent many long weekends with Ashley, basking in the sun on the gentle sands of the beach. In fact, he had proposed to her in a lighthouse on one of the Outer Banks barrier islands, and it had been the site of their first and only family vacation with Leslie.
“I don’t know another person who knows the banks as well as you, Garcia,” Davis continued. “And that’s why I need your team to do something that no one else has been able to.”
— 2 —
Garcia did not look forward to the mission to the Outer Banks, and he could not help the sigh he let out. One tinged with grief and sadness.
“President Mitchell ordered the reestablishment of Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia,” Davis said. “We’ve had the chance to salvage most of the base, and we’re on track to making it functional again. It’s the largest naval station in the world, and we absolutely need it as a resource to keep the GW strike group afloat.”
“That would be a tremendous boon to the navy,” Garcia said. Anything to relieve the strike group’s constant worry about how and when they would refuel, resupply, and make repairs would drastically improve the ships’ chances at making it through the apocalypse, not to mention bolster the crew’s morale. But Garcia had long since learned all great gains came with great costs. “So what’s the hitch?”
“Perimeter defenses were holding until a new influx of Variants threatened the naval station’s restoration. Variant attacks have been increasing both in size and frequency. The Variants started coming once or twice a day in small groups, almost like they were probing the defenses. Now the attacks are occurring every two to three hours, and the monsters are finding their way into the base. Casualties are mounting, and President Mitchell is considering abandoning the station entirely.”
